This story is proof that in almost all languages the six most powerful words are, “Let me tell you a story,” and stories are not only memorable but they travel and this one travelled a lot. I read this story for the first time in Paul Smith’s book, ‘Lead with a story’. He talks about a story that his ex-colleague Jason Zoller who went on to become the director of consumer and market knowledge at Proctor and Gamble shares and Zoller was not someone who was part of the story.
He had heard the story from his professor in college. The story is about a bunch of college students who are assigned a project with the local district judge. The brief from the judge was can you look at the entire jury deliberation process and see whether any improvements can be made. They were loving this project; this was such a noble thing to do – work on the judicial system.
They went ahead and took each of the cases done in the last two years and then met everyone involved, the jurors the judges, the people in the courtroom, etc. They asked every type of question they could think of “How many were male jurors, female jurors? How many were whites, how many were black, how many were ethnic? How many were old, how many were young? How long did they spend, did they work in the evenings? What kind of instructions were they given? What kind of food were they given?” and they tried to see if any of that had the bearing in the judicial system and in the justice given.
They found that none of them changed anything. What did was something very strange it was the shape of the jury table. The jurors met to do their deliberations in a room and sometimes the table was either round or oval or sometimes rectangular. When the table was rectangular they saw that whoever was sitting at the head of the table, he need not have been the jury foreman, dominated the conversation in fact so much that many of the jurors did not find it encouraging enough to speak. Whereas, when it was round or oval, everyone deliberated and then there was more robust decision-making.
They were excited at this finding not only because they thought this was a critical one and – it was easily implementable you could always change all the tables – round or oval with this they went and presented with a lot of hope that they had really made a difference. The judge was excited – but what came as a surprise is the pronouncement the judge made. He gave an order to all the courts in his jurisdiction that they should take out all the round and oval tables and replace them with rectangular tables.
The students were obviously aghast because they thought that what they had tried to do was get the system to be better and now they had unwittingly got the system to be worse. Why did that happen? That’s because the objective of the judge was very different when the judge said that look at the jury deliberation system and see if you can make it better what he was working with is how can you make it shorter. He had a huge backlog of case files and he wanted to get them out of the door as fast as he could.
What a powerful story!
Business Points ( Tags )
#objective #identifying #objective #clarifying
#Jurysystem
